what is a terrorist? someone who uses fear to get what he wants? Attack a few to influence the many? Isn't that Chris Christies saying that we should still be afraid of strikes in the USA?
Play Video0:36
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
black people are as dangerous as war zones
ITs always the same thing. They were under duress. they thought they had been threatened by violence. "lunged" at by a missile. The systems were not working.
Sorry, but the more likeley reason is the salivating blood thirsty complete lack of any soul animal instinct to kill that we have been turned into by the ccp as evidenced by the attack highlighted by the wikileaks video showing attacks which sought to destroy a group of humans who were only trying to help others. The ccp has infiltrated us all. They are willing to sell the organs of prisoners of conscience that they are holding. profit by god made parts.
U.S. suspends military personnel over attack in Kunduz
It's
been nearly a month since an American gunship destroyed a hospital run
by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The attack left the
area without a proper medical facility. Here is a look at the
destruction. (Sudarsan Raghavan and Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)
Several American personnel, most likely pilots and U.S. special operations soldiers, who made the decision that led to one of the deadliest incidents of civilian casualties of the war, have been suspended and could face further disciplinary action, senior U.S. officials told reporters in Kabul on Wednesday.
“This was a tragic and avoidable accident caused primarily by human error,” said Gen. John Campbell, the top U.S. commander for Afghanistan, adding that it was “compounded by systems and procedural failures.”
The medical facility, the location of which was widely known in Kunduz, was misidentified as a target by the American personnel, Campbell said. They thought they were striking the headquarters of the Afghan intelligence service several hundred meters away, which the Taliban had reportedly seized.
Investigators also concluded that those who requested the air strike, as well as those who executed it from the air, did not take the proper measures to verify that it was a legitimate military target, Campbell said.
But many questions remained after Campbell presented the findings. Just before the attack on the hospital, a U.S. air strike pummeled an empty warehouse across the street from the Afghan intelligence headquarters. How U.S. personnel could have confused its location only a few hours later is not clear, nor is it clear why the gunship repeatedly bombed the hospital when there was no retrun fire.
According to the report’s findings, on the night of Oct. 2, Afghan special forces requested air support to help clear the Taliban from the headquarters of the intelligence service, known as the National Directorate of Security, or NDS. The U.S. Special Operations commander on the ground agreed, but he had no clear view of either the NDS building or the Doctors Without Borders hospital.
From this point on, the errors began, said Campbell.
The powerful AC-130 gunship dispatched to provide air support flew out quickly without conducting a normal mission brief and without vital information, including a list of no-strike areas, which would have included the hospital. And during the flight the electronic systems malfunctioned, preventing the pilots from sending or receiving emails or electronic messages or transmitting video back to control rooms, Campbell said.
In addition, the aircrew thought the aircraft was targeted by a missile, which forced the gunship to move away from its original flight path, lessening the accuracy of some of its targeting systems, Campbell said. By the time the plane got the strike coordinates for the NDS building, they correlated to an open field 300 meters away from the NDS building (about 330 yards). So the aircrew decided to visually target the hospital, which was near the field and superficially matched the description of the NDS compound.
Still, even with these technical glitches, the attack on the hospital could have been prevented, investigators found. The gunship, at one point, returned to its original flight path and the grid location system correctly aligned with the NDS building. But “the crew remained fixated” on the hospital and did not rely on the grid location system, Campbell said.
Investigators also found that the aircrew did not observe any hostile activity coming from the hospital, and so could have opted not to bomb it.
Friday, November 13, 2015
The Paris attacks came on the same day that the U.S. said it was
“reasonably certain” that it killed the Islamic State extremist known as
“Jihadi John” in an air strike in Syria. The man, a British citizen
called Mohamed Emwazi, became infamous internationally from his
appearance in videos showing the beheadings of Americans held by the
terrorist group.
Heres what I know:
WOlf blitzer was asking an on scene reporter if the assailants were wearing mblack masks and had islamic accents. trying to lead us to a conclusion.
Bloomberg states that the attack came on the same day as the announcement that Jihadi john was killed leading one to believe that the attack was some kind of response to the killing of him. but isnt this possibly just coincidence? IT seems improbable that a group could organize such a large coordinated attack that quick on the same day as an annoucment of a comrades death. SO they had to plan it or know in advance when the death was going to be announced. the only people who could reasonably know in advance of an announcement in US is of a military strike is the governemtn that runs the military.
Heres what I know:
WOlf blitzer was asking an on scene reporter if the assailants were wearing mblack masks and had islamic accents. trying to lead us to a conclusion.
Bloomberg states that the attack came on the same day as the announcement that Jihadi john was killed leading one to believe that the attack was some kind of response to the killing of him. but isnt this possibly just coincidence? IT seems improbable that a group could organize such a large coordinated attack that quick on the same day as an annoucment of a comrades death. SO they had to plan it or know in advance when the death was going to be announced. the only people who could reasonably know in advance of an announcement in US is of a military strike is the governemtn that runs the military.
China Lacks Coherent Crisis Strategy
Ex British FSA Chief: China Lacks Coherent Crisis Strategy
A
kung fu master training with his students at the kung fu academy in
Qufu, Shandong province on July 22, 2015. (FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images)
Adair Turner, the Baron Turner of Ecchinswell is not your average regulator. First off, he steered the British banking system through the financial crisis in 2008 as the head of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), Britain’s former financial regulatory body.
ADVERTISING
He started to ask questions going beyond capital ratios and counterparty risk management. He questioned the whole financial system itself and came to the same conclusions previously reserved to rogue economists such as Hyman Minsky and Steve Keen.
Ultimately the Chinese regime is responsible for the debts of the banks.
In his book “Between Debt and the Devil”
he analyses the dangerous effects unrestrained bank credit has on the
economy. He reserved a special chapter for China, where state banks are
solely responsible for managing the money supply and therefore the whole
economy.Epoch Times spoke to Mr. Turner about China’s policy options to ward off a full blown financial crisis.
Epoch Times: China has created a lot of money through its banking system and yet people still think the country’s debt level is low.
Mr. Turner: China has had a massive increase in debt to GDP. It really is an extraordinary phenomenon, this increase over the past 5 years. It’s bank credit but also off-balance-sheet credit.
Some of it is extended in a set of complicated shadow banking activities through things like wealth management products and things which are special-purpose vehicles.
They are not entirely off the bank balance sheets because when they go wrong, the banks feel the need to bail them out or are under pressure to bail them out. It’s a terrible combination of a lack of clarity as to where the real credit risk lies and whether something is guaranteed or not. This is always a terrible situation to be in, wondering whether something is guaranteed by the bank or not.
Lord
Adair Turner, the chairman of the Institute of New Economic Thinking
and former head of the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) in New York
on Oct. 16, 2015. (Samira Bouaou/Epoch Times)
Mr. Turner: There has been a huge explosion of credit. It began in early 2009 and it was a deliberate response to the slowdown of the rest of the world and the deleveraging of the rest of the world. The deleveraging in the West was taking demand out of the world economy and therefore threatening the Chinese economy.
They poured concrete all over the place
To offset the deleveraging of the rest of the economy was to
deliberately launch a very big credit-fueled investment boom in China.
The Chinese investment rate went up from an already unbelievably high 42
percent of GDP to about 49 percent of GDP.They poured concrete all over the place, they built 6-lane highways, they bought apartment blocks, and channeled huge lending to local governments.
They channeled huge lending to state-owned industries in heavy industries such as steel, cement, and concrete, fueling this construction boom; a boom of enormous construction credit financing.
That has essentially run out of steam and there are now falling property prices, at least in some parts of the economy. Though every now and then the government deliberately tries to keep the thing going.
One of the dangers when you’ve got a credit boom like that going is: You’re terrified of keeping it going. If you keep it going for longer you’re going to have a worse problem when you stop eventually.
But you’re terrified of stopping it because the moment you stop it you’re going to have a whole load of unemployed builders and steel mills with excess capacity.
Epoch Times: And the Chinese regime doesn’t want unemployment.
Mr. Turner: What has been playing out in China for the last year is the tension of the government worrying about too much credit but worrying about what happens when they slow the credit and there’s been a set of policy responses that are not entirely coherent. They suggest that policy derives from a competing process from many different bits of the government.
There’s been a set of policy responses that are not entirely coherent.
The net effect of all that is there’s a very major slowdown occurring in the Chinese economy and probably a bigger slowdown than is in the official statistics.However, this is unlikely to produce a financial crisis narrowly defined as in the financial crisis of 2008 because most of these debts are owed from some bits of the Chinese government system to other bits of the Chinese government system. Like local government to local government-owned banks.
So it’s possible for the Chinese government to perform a set of accounting gimmicks moving the debt all to the central government balance sheet and control the financial effect.
If you keep it going for longer you’re going to have a worse problem when you stop eventually.
So I don’t anticipate that this is going to produce a sudden domino effect
where one bank goes down, so another bank goes down, which we had in
2007 to 2008. Ultimately the Chinese regime is responsible for the debts
of the banks.But I do think this is having a major deflationary effect on the world economy which we are seeing in the Asian supply chains, throughout the commodity markets and this is giving a further twist to the deflationary post-crisis debt overhang which we were stuck in anyway.
The Truth About Banking: Former Top Regulator Speaks Out
The Truth About Banking: Former Top Regulator Speaks Out
Lord
Adair Turner, the chairman of the Institute of New Economic Thinking
and former head of the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) in New York
on Oct. 16, 2015. (Samira Bouaou/Epoch Times)
Adair Turner, the Baron Turner of Ecchinswell is not
your average regulator. First off, he steered the British banking system
through the financial crisis in 2008 as the head of the Financial
Services Authority (FSA), Britain’s former financial regulatory body.
But how is that different from other regulators such as Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke?
He started to ask questions going beyond capital ratios and counterparty risk management. He questioned the whole financial system itself and came to the same conclusions previously reserved to rogue economists such as Hyman Minsky and Steve Keen.
Epoch Times: When did you realize bank credit was dangerous?
Adair Turner: I felt that we were not asking some fundamental questions that need to be asked. I remember a point in autumn 2008 where we were debating whether we should take measure to regulate the credit default swap market, which had played a role in the crisis.
Some of my staff experts at the FSA said to me, “If we regulate credit default swaps that will reduce the liquidity and that will make it more difficult to create credit in the economy.” Even at that stage I began to ask, “Are we confident that all credit in the economy is a good thing?”
So I began to ask those questions early on. Then I gave a speech in spring 2010 titled, “What Do Banks Do and What Should They Do?”
I did a lot of analysis then and it was at that stage I began to be struck by the huge difference between what our textbooks said they did, and what they actually do.
Mr. Turner: Banks create credit money and purchasing power. It’s mathematically the case that once a bank creates a loan, there is a bank liability and there is purchasing power.
The fact that banks create money, credit, and purchasing power is something very well understood by early 20th century economists such as Knut Wicksell or Friedrich von Hayek, but it went out of the way of thinking from about the 1960s onward.
I ask the question in the final chapter of my book, “Why did economics make so many fundamental mistakes?” I think it developed a desire to model the system in a highly mathematical fashion and it turns out it is much easier to do if you just ignore the banking system.
What you end up with is an economics that is mathematically very sophisticated, but totally unrealistic. One of the ways that it’s totally unrealistic is in its representation of the baking system.
Epoch Times: So banks basically print money. Why are you the first high-level official to delve into the topic?
Mr. Turner: Often in the worlds of financial regulation experts are very slightly detached from real economic theory as well as from reality. I find it a bit of a mystery because it has become very obvious that this is a fundamental understanding of the economic process. It’s the same mystery of why the insights of Hyman Minsky were ignored for so long?
There’s really something very odd about the resilience within economics of certain rather mechanical ways of looking at the world which are mathematically traceable but deeply untrue.
Mr. Turner: Whether the banks directly influenced the academia on this particular issue of “let’s cover the fact that we create credit, money, and purchasing power,” I’m not so sure because I think the funny thing is a lot of bankers themselves don’t understand that’s what they do.
To them it feels like I’ve got to get a deposit in before I can lend. They fail to think through how the interaction of several banks together and the operation of the interbank market means the system in total can create new credit and money that didn’t previously exist.
So one of the things that struck me is how little many, very good, successful, practical bankers understand the totality of the system of which they are a particular cog.
Epoch Times: What about the political system?
Mr. Turner: At any one time there is a whole group who had a shared interest in there being more credit. So the banks wanted to grow their balance sheets and they wanted low capital requirements.
Then let’s take the United States: You had politicians which wanted the banking system or the capital market system to lend as much money as easily as possible to householders to enable people to feel like they were participating in the American Dream despite not receiving any increase in real wages.
The idea is that we’ve got to extend house ownership, and the way to extend house ownership is to extend easy mortgage credit. This was a belief shared across the political spectrum and interfaced with the banking system saying “Ah yes, and if you leave us alone and give us light capital standards and let us develop all these complicated new credit securities we’ll be able to provide that credit.”
Epoch Times: But this whole scheme doesn’t work.
Mr. Turner: Easy credit and housing markets are a very interesting paradox. Easy credit is good for the person who doesn’t own a house, because they get to borrow money for the house.
Lots of easy credit is terrible for the person who doesn’t yet own a house because it pushes up the price of houses to a level where they can only afford it by taking on levels of debt which are a threat to their sustainability.
The price has been driven really high precisely by the easy credit, which was meant to allow them into the system.
Epoch Times: So how do we get rid of excess credit and shrink the banking system down to size again?
Mr.Turner: There are two ways essentially to control a bank balance sheet, two regulatory levers. One is how much capital, on the liability side of their bank balance sheet they have to have as a percentage of total assets or liabilities.
The other, how many liquid reserve assets they have to hold on the asset side of their balance sheet. In subtly different ways these both constrain the growth of bank credit.
On the capital side, I would like to see much higher capital ratios but I would have to develop those slowly. If I simply walked in tomorrow and I said, “Right, you’ve all got to have capital ratios of 20 percent not 10 percent; you can only be leveraged 5 to 1 not 10 to 1,” the immediate impact of that would be the banks ceasing lending in an attempt to raise their capital ratios and there would be a credit crunch.
Once you’ve got a level of debt in the economy you can’t switch off the new debt supply just like that. You’ve got to slowly migrate out of that situation.
On the reserve asset side, which basically says we’ve got to control what’s called the banking multiplier, that’s the relationship between the monetary base and the credit money. We couldn’t suddenly put it up to a 20 percent ratio [now around 7 percent], but gradually increase it to 15 percent.
At the point where you’ve got enough stimulus and you don’t want more, you make those reserves mandatory, so they can’t say, “Oh you’ve given me a whole load of reserves. In year one, I didn’t do much more than hold them. In year two, I suddenly expand my balance sheet.”
Epoch Times: You are a proponent of so called “helicopter money,” permanently printing money and giving it directly to the people without putting the tax payer on the hook.
Mr. Turner: We’ve created a lot of new monetary base with the quantitative easing, so what we could do is accept that the new monetary base is permanent, which is helicopter money that is never going to have to be repaid. This removes some of the constraints on the government’s fiscal position.
It can literally be a direct funding of government. … There are a variety of ways to do it. It can be the government debt finances an increased fiscal deficit at the end of which the banks have a whole load of government bonds on their balance sheet.
The central bank buys the bonds from the banks and does an accounting exercise on the asset-side to turn them into an irredeemable, zero interest asset from the government.
When you make quantitative easing permanent it ceases to be a liquidity exercise and becomes a mechanism for allowing governments to run fiscal deficits which do not create a future debt servicing liability.
Epoch Times: This process would violate virtually all central bank statutes ever written.
Mr. Turner: All these helicopter money exercises require us to break a taboo. We have put in place a set of constraints which are precisely designed to prevent governments believing they have a free source of money.
My resolution of that is to authorize the independent central bank to say how much of this helicopter money you can do. So I wouldn’t write a central bank constitution that says you must never fund government expenditure.
I would write a constitution that says the government cannot force you to fund its expenditure and you, the monetary policy committee of the central bank, must make a decision about how much monetary finance is appropriate given the inflation target which we have asked you to follow.
Epoch Times: And we need two inflation targets.
Mr. Turner: I don’t think one is sufficient. We also need another set of measure to control the bank’s creation of credit which has nothing to do with [consumer price] inflation because a lot of credit doesn’t produce current goods and services inflation. It produce’s asset price inflation, so you need to control that as well.
In pursuit of the consumer price inflation target, I would give the central bank the authority to say, “We have thought about how we’re going to get back to target—the most efficient way to do it would be to do a certain amount of money-financed deficits.”
Then as the government, they would consider how that 35 billion pounds was going to be used. Is it done as a tax cut, is it done as a new public investment, public expenditure, etc.? You can’t have the central bank make the decision. Is this regressive or progressive?
Those are essentially political decisions. But I think you can separate the decision about the amount, which would reside with the central bank, from the decision about how specifically to deliver the boost, which can be made by the government.
But how is that different from other regulators such as Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke?
He started to ask questions going beyond capital ratios and counterparty risk management. He questioned the whole financial system itself and came to the same conclusions previously reserved to rogue economists such as Hyman Minsky and Steve Keen.
Banks create credit money and purchasing power
As one of the only senior decision makers in financial regulation he
boldly states what these rogue economists have known for a long time:
Banks manufacture money in the form of credit and it’s not always for
the best of society. In his book “Between Debt and the Devil,” he describes the process in detail and also makes the case of printing money to finance government deficits.Epoch Times: When did you realize bank credit was dangerous?
Adair Turner: I felt that we were not asking some fundamental questions that need to be asked. I remember a point in autumn 2008 where we were debating whether we should take measure to regulate the credit default swap market, which had played a role in the crisis.
Some of my staff experts at the FSA said to me, “If we regulate credit default swaps that will reduce the liquidity and that will make it more difficult to create credit in the economy.” Even at that stage I began to ask, “Are we confident that all credit in the economy is a good thing?”
So I began to ask those questions early on. Then I gave a speech in spring 2010 titled, “What Do Banks Do and What Should They Do?”
I did a lot of analysis then and it was at that stage I began to be struck by the huge difference between what our textbooks said they did, and what they actually do.
A lot of bankers themselves don’t understand that’s what they do.
Epoch Times: People think banks compete for deposits and then loan out that money. What do banks do in your opinion?Mr. Turner: Banks create credit money and purchasing power. It’s mathematically the case that once a bank creates a loan, there is a bank liability and there is purchasing power.
The fact that banks create money, credit, and purchasing power is something very well understood by early 20th century economists such as Knut Wicksell or Friedrich von Hayek, but it went out of the way of thinking from about the 1960s onward.
I ask the question in the final chapter of my book, “Why did economics make so many fundamental mistakes?” I think it developed a desire to model the system in a highly mathematical fashion and it turns out it is much easier to do if you just ignore the banking system.
What you end up with is an economics that is mathematically very sophisticated, but totally unrealistic. One of the ways that it’s totally unrealistic is in its representation of the baking system.
Epoch Times: So banks basically print money. Why are you the first high-level official to delve into the topic?
Mr. Turner: Often in the worlds of financial regulation experts are very slightly detached from real economic theory as well as from reality. I find it a bit of a mystery because it has become very obvious that this is a fundamental understanding of the economic process. It’s the same mystery of why the insights of Hyman Minsky were ignored for so long?
There’s really something very odd about the resilience within economics of certain rather mechanical ways of looking at the world which are mathematically traceable but deeply untrue.
What you end up with is an economics that is mathematically very sophisticated but totally unrealistic.
Epoch Times: Do you think banks are actively engaged in protecting their monopoly of creating money?Mr. Turner: Whether the banks directly influenced the academia on this particular issue of “let’s cover the fact that we create credit, money, and purchasing power,” I’m not so sure because I think the funny thing is a lot of bankers themselves don’t understand that’s what they do.
To them it feels like I’ve got to get a deposit in before I can lend. They fail to think through how the interaction of several banks together and the operation of the interbank market means the system in total can create new credit and money that didn’t previously exist.
So one of the things that struck me is how little many, very good, successful, practical bankers understand the totality of the system of which they are a particular cog.
Epoch Times: What about the political system?
Mr. Turner: At any one time there is a whole group who had a shared interest in there being more credit. So the banks wanted to grow their balance sheets and they wanted low capital requirements.
Then let’s take the United States: You had politicians which wanted the banking system or the capital market system to lend as much money as easily as possible to householders to enable people to feel like they were participating in the American Dream despite not receiving any increase in real wages.
The idea is that we’ve got to extend house ownership, and the way to extend house ownership is to extend easy mortgage credit. This was a belief shared across the political spectrum and interfaced with the banking system saying “Ah yes, and if you leave us alone and give us light capital standards and let us develop all these complicated new credit securities we’ll be able to provide that credit.”
Epoch Times: But this whole scheme doesn’t work.
Mr. Turner: Easy credit and housing markets are a very interesting paradox. Easy credit is good for the person who doesn’t own a house, because they get to borrow money for the house.
Lots of easy credit is terrible for the person who doesn’t yet own a house because it pushes up the price of houses to a level where they can only afford it by taking on levels of debt which are a threat to their sustainability.
Often in the
worlds of financial regulation experts are very slightly detached form
real economic theory as well as from reality.
In the United Kingdom, up until about 1998 we had an increasing level
of house ownership, which a lot of people assumed was being driven by
easy mortgages supply. Then from about 2000 the level of house ownership
begins to go down because 25- and 30-year-olds can no longer afford the
deposits.The price has been driven really high precisely by the easy credit, which was meant to allow them into the system.
Epoch Times: So how do we get rid of excess credit and shrink the banking system down to size again?
Mr.Turner: There are two ways essentially to control a bank balance sheet, two regulatory levers. One is how much capital, on the liability side of their bank balance sheet they have to have as a percentage of total assets or liabilities.
The other, how many liquid reserve assets they have to hold on the asset side of their balance sheet. In subtly different ways these both constrain the growth of bank credit.
On the capital side, I would like to see much higher capital ratios but I would have to develop those slowly. If I simply walked in tomorrow and I said, “Right, you’ve all got to have capital ratios of 20 percent not 10 percent; you can only be leveraged 5 to 1 not 10 to 1,” the immediate impact of that would be the banks ceasing lending in an attempt to raise their capital ratios and there would be a credit crunch.
Once you’ve got a level of debt in the economy you can’t switch off the new debt supply just like that. You’ve got to slowly migrate out of that situation.
When you make quantitative easing permanent it ceases to be a liquidity exercise.
You could have a process where you say, “You’ve got to get to a much
higher capital ratio quickly. I’m not going to let you do that by
shrinking your balance sheet. You’ve got to do that by issuing new
shares. If you can get that new equity issue from the private market,
very well, if you can’t, the government will subscribe that equity,
which you may not want, and I’ll make sure that we get that higher
equity without producing a credit crunch.”On the reserve asset side, which basically says we’ve got to control what’s called the banking multiplier, that’s the relationship between the monetary base and the credit money. We couldn’t suddenly put it up to a 20 percent ratio [now around 7 percent], but gradually increase it to 15 percent.
At the point where you’ve got enough stimulus and you don’t want more, you make those reserves mandatory, so they can’t say, “Oh you’ve given me a whole load of reserves. In year one, I didn’t do much more than hold them. In year two, I suddenly expand my balance sheet.”
Epoch Times: You are a proponent of so called “helicopter money,” permanently printing money and giving it directly to the people without putting the tax payer on the hook.
Mr. Turner: We’ve created a lot of new monetary base with the quantitative easing, so what we could do is accept that the new monetary base is permanent, which is helicopter money that is never going to have to be repaid. This removes some of the constraints on the government’s fiscal position.
It can literally be a direct funding of government. … There are a variety of ways to do it. It can be the government debt finances an increased fiscal deficit at the end of which the banks have a whole load of government bonds on their balance sheet.
The central bank buys the bonds from the banks and does an accounting exercise on the asset-side to turn them into an irredeemable, zero interest asset from the government.
When you make quantitative easing permanent it ceases to be a liquidity exercise and becomes a mechanism for allowing governments to run fiscal deficits which do not create a future debt servicing liability.
All these helicopter money exercises require us to break a taboo.
And the money goes to the people directly. But because with
fractional reserve banking the worry is that you think you want to do a
$100 billion stimulus. So you do a $100 billion stimulus, but unless you
take a controlling mechanism through reserve asset ratio, the banks
could subsequently turn what you wanted to be $100 billion stimulus into
a $500 billion stimulus.Epoch Times: This process would violate virtually all central bank statutes ever written.
Mr. Turner: All these helicopter money exercises require us to break a taboo. We have put in place a set of constraints which are precisely designed to prevent governments believing they have a free source of money.
My resolution of that is to authorize the independent central bank to say how much of this helicopter money you can do. So I wouldn’t write a central bank constitution that says you must never fund government expenditure.
I would write a constitution that says the government cannot force you to fund its expenditure and you, the monetary policy committee of the central bank, must make a decision about how much monetary finance is appropriate given the inflation target which we have asked you to follow.
Epoch Times: And we need two inflation targets.
Mr. Turner: I don’t think one is sufficient. We also need another set of measure to control the bank’s creation of credit which has nothing to do with [consumer price] inflation because a lot of credit doesn’t produce current goods and services inflation. It produce’s asset price inflation, so you need to control that as well.
In pursuit of the consumer price inflation target, I would give the central bank the authority to say, “We have thought about how we’re going to get back to target—the most efficient way to do it would be to do a certain amount of money-financed deficits.”
Easy credit and housing markets have a very interesting paradox.
In 2009 I would have given to the Bank of England the authority to
say “We’re not going to do 375 billion pound reversible quantitative
easing which we think somehow gets to the real economy through asset
price increases. We are going to authorize 35 billion pounds of direct
expenditure for the government funded by permanent central bank money
creation.”Then as the government, they would consider how that 35 billion pounds was going to be used. Is it done as a tax cut, is it done as a new public investment, public expenditure, etc.? You can’t have the central bank make the decision. Is this regressive or progressive?
Those are essentially political decisions. But I think you can separate the decision about the amount, which would reside with the central bank, from the decision about how specifically to deliver the boost, which can be made by the government.
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Chalabi dies of a heart attack. WHen you lie your heart gets weak.
abcnews.go.com
Iraq's Ahmad Chalabi, Leading Voice Behind 2003 War, Dies
ABC News
Ahmad Chalabi, a prominent Iraqi politician who became a Pentagon
favorite when he helped convince the Bush administration to overthrow Saddam Hussein
in 2003 by pushing false allegations of weapons of mass destruction and
links to al-Qaida, died Tuesday of a heart attack. He was 71.
Iraqi state TV said he died in Baghdad but did not provide further details.
Chalabi, a secular Shiite politician who lived in exile for decades, was
a leading proponent of the invasion and had close ties to many in the
Bush administration, who viewed him as a favorite to lead Iraq.
However, he had a falling out with the Pentagon after the invasion, and
was largely sidelined by other Iraqi leaders, many with close ties to
neighboring Iran. Chalabi had most recently been serving as the chairman
of parliament's finance committee, and was previously a deputy prime
minister.
To his supporters in Iraq, Chalabi was a campaigner for democracy who deserves credit for Saddam's removal.
"It is a very bad day for Iraq," Shiite lawmaker Muwaffak al-Rubaie, a
former national security adviser, told The Associated Press. "He was one
of the most seasoned and pioneering politicians. Chalabi worked for a
democratic, liberal Iraq ... I am glad he died peacefully."
But Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who met with Chalabi repeatedly in
the mid-1990s and in the lead-up to the 2003 war, called him a "con
man" who was able to manipulate American politicians.
"He was the most charming man I've had to deal with at the CIA and the
most educated," Baer told the AP. "He understood American politics and
he understood the American political narrative better than most
Americans."
The scion of a wealthy Baghdad family, Chalabi fled Iraq as a teenager
when the monarchy was overthrown. He earned a bachelor's degree from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965, and then went on to get a
PhD in mathematics at the University of Chicago.
He became a leading figure in Iraq's exiled opposition in the 1990s and cultivated close ties with the future Vice President Dick Cheney and Washington's so-called neo-conservatives, who favored a more muscular U.S. policy in the Middle East.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Chalabi played a key role in convincing the administration that the Iraqi government had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaida, unfounded claims at the heart of the case for war.
"There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Saddam has them, and
they are developing them continuously, and I think, if there is a
correct way to look for them, they will be found," Chalabi told AP
television in 2003.
After the invasion, Chalabi was appointed to the 25-member Iraqi
governing council and earned a seat directly behind First Lady Laura
Bush during the 2004 State of the Union.
"He more than any other Iraqi helped get rid of Saddam," said Sajad
Jiyad, a fellow at the Iraqi Institute for Economic Reform in Baghdad.
"He brought together all the opposition parties — Islamists, communists,
ex-Baathists, secularists, nationalists."
Chalabi went on to chair Iraq's de-Baathification Committee, which
worked to purge the government of Saddam loyalists but was seen by the
country's Sunni minority as a means of sectarian score-settling by the
country's newly empowered Shiite majority.
Baer, the former CIA officer, said Chalabi's role in de-Baathification
in particular was severely destructive. "He alienated the Sunnis more
than anyone" else in Iraq, Baer said.
Chalabi's relationship with the U.S. soured in the months after the
invasion, and in 2004 U.S. forces raided his home on suspicions that he
was funneling intelligence to Iran.
In 2010, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill said Chalabi was
"under the influence of Iran," and "a gentleman who has been challenged
over the years to be seen as a straightforward individual."
After a closed-door briefing with Chalabi in 2005, then-Representative
Christopher Shays told The AP: "I wouldn't be surprised if he told
Iranians facts, issues, whatever, we did not want them to know in order
to develop a relationship."
Chalabi strongly denied the allegations, dismissing them as politically motivated.
Chalabi also faced accusations of financial impropriety throughout his career linked to business dealings in neighboring Jordan.
In 1992, a Jordanian court tried and convicted Chalabi in absentia for
bank fraud in connection with the collapse of Petra Bank, an institution
he established in the late 1980s with the help of members of the
Jordanian royal family. After quickly becoming one of the country's
leading banks, it collapsed in 1990 with millions missing in deposits.
He fled the country days after Jordanian authorities took control of the
bank.
An audit commissioned by Jordan months later found Petra Bank had overstated its assets by more than $300 million.
Chalabi was sentenced to 22 years of hard labor in prison and ordered to
pay back $230 million of the bank's funds the court said he embezzled, a
sentence he never served.
He repeatedly denied the charges, and filed a suit in the U.S. against
the Jordanian government, claiming the ruling was politically motivated.
King Abdullah II of Jordan eventually pardoned Chalabi after he assumed
the post of deputy prime minister of Iraq.
In recent years, Chalabi focused his efforts on budget talks and working
to expose fraud within the government. He also lent support to the 2011
uprising in Bahrain, led by that country's Shiite majority against its
Sunni monarchy.
His Baghdad home was a testament to one of his passions — art collecting
— with paintings lining the hallways and exotic sculptures decorating
each room. As recently as a month ago, he regularly attended events at
the Baghdad National Theatre and other music and art venues.
He is survived by his wife Leila Osseiran, the daughter of the prominent
Lebanese politician Adil Osseiran, and their four children, including
Tamara Chalabi, a well-known author.
———
Associated Press writers Vivian Salama and Susannah George in Baghdad and Joseph Krauss in Cairo contributed to this report.
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